Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  Mitchum found that as a director Huston had a distinct sense of rhythm he could impose on a scene and a painter’s eye for detail, but he allowed for the randomness of real life to enter the frame as well, keeping the scenes fresh, unstudied. When dealing with actors, Huston believed that once the proper person had assumed a given role, that performer brought with him the nuance and personality the role was meant to have. He therefore said very little to the actors before shooting a scene, although, unlike the other tough guy directors Mitchum had worked with, Huston had the intellectual capacity and education to verbalize whatever subtleties and values he sought should the need arise. Mitchum claimed that the most direction Huston ever gave him was to say, at the end of one take, “I think, kid . . . even more.” As he did so often, Mitchum used his observational skills and talent for mimickry and accents to bring the simple U.S. Marine character to idiosyncratic life. “Robert based his Mr. Allison character entirely on Tim Wallace,” said Reva Frederick. “He decided that was the perfect model for that part, with the Brooklyn accent and everything, and the whole performance was a perfect imitation of Tim.”

  Huston would sing his star’s praises forever after: “A delight to work with, and he gave a beautiful performance. He is one of the finest actors I’ve ever had anything to do with. His air of casualness, or rather, his lack of pomposity is put down as a lack of seriousness, but when I say he’s a fine actor, I mean an actor of the caliber of Olivier, Burton, and Brando. In other words, the very best in the field.” If Mitchum walked through many pictures with his eyes half open, said Huston, it was because “that’s all that’s called for, but he is in fact capable of playing King Lear.”

  After making a poor show of his first scene, Mitchum quickly set about regaining Huston’s and the crew’s confidence by giving his all to the next day’s action, which called for him to crawl across the razorlike coral reef and through the underbrush beyond the shoreline. By the time he’d finished crawling and the director called, “Cut,” he had scraped his flesh open in a dozen places. Huston and assistants ran down to look at the streams of blood.

  “Jesus Christ, Bob!” said Huston.

  Mitchum shrugged. “You work, you suffer.”

  He didn’t know the half of it. There were still palm trees to be scaled, gullies and swamps to fall into, giant tortoises to ride. The three-hundred-pound turtle towed him for what seemed like miles. He was supposed to be catching the creature for food but, said Mitchum, “it was a wonder the damn thing didn’t eat me. As it was, he almost dashed me against the coral reef.” He caught his foot on a tree root and nearly twisted it in a full circle. “The bastard Huston’s going to kill me,” he moaned en route to a doctor. And then there were the mosquitoes that infected Mitchum and several others in the company with dengue, a painful, infectious tropical disease producing high temperature, body rash, and swelling of the joints.

  The comelier half of the virtually two-person cast had no easier a time of it. It was like they said about Ginger Rogers—she did everything Fred Astaire did, and backward. For the scene in which the nun runs away and passes out in a mangrove swamp, Kerr had to spend days half submerged in horrible slime and wads of sticky alligator shit. “Deborah had to lie down in this mess,” said Huston, “and she did it without a word of complaint. It was only years later that I discovered . . . she had dreams of this swamp for weeks afterward.”

  Kerr, too, would get a dose of dengue and spent several days in the local hospital. But her most unrelieved agony was undoubtedly her wardrobe, the heavy nun’s habit that had to be worn from dawn to dusk in the scorching tropical temperatures. “Talk about mad dogs and Englishmen,” she gasped, scratching and sweating in the itchy costume. Mitchum claimed that two members of the crew were employed entirely for the purpose of holding Deborah’s skirts up between takes and “cooling her ass with a fan.”

  Kerr and Mitchum were a magical team. The actress likened their work together to a perfect doubles pair at tennis. Getting to know him in those first days on Tobago, as they sat on the “soft pink sand,” Kerr recalled finding herself “listening to an extremely sensitive, a poetic, extraordinarily interesting man . . . a perceptive, amusing person with a great gift for telling a story, and possessed of a completely unexpected vast fund of knowledge . . . Bob was at all times patient, concerned, and completely professional, always in good humor, and always ready to make a joke when things became trying.” Laura Nightingale, a wardrobe girl on the film, described Mitchum’s great sensitivity toward his costar to journalist Lloyd Shearer: Sensing that her feet were hurting from the sharp rocks she’d been standing on, “He just kneeled down, unlaced her white sneakers, removed them and massaged her feet. It was lovely and compassionate the way he did it. . . . Then he put her sneakers back on and said kind of brusquely to hide his tenderness, ‘Gotta keep you alive for the next scene.’ Then he walked away. Deborah was so touched she cried.”

  Deborah became Bob’s great platonic love. He would speak of her ever after as his all-time favorite actress and the “only leading lady I didn’t go to bed with”—an exaggeration in any case, but meant somehow as a compliment. When they met he had been expecting a prim Englishwoman like the rather frosty ladies she often played on screen, but Kerr turned out to be one of the boys. She was a rare delight, warm, wise, earthy. One time she was rowing a raft in open water during the tortoise-chasing scene, Huston constantly shouting, “Faster! Row faster!” The wooden oars split in half in her hands, and Kerr, in her damp nun’s habit, screamed in fury, “Is that fucking fast enough?” Mitchum, floating nearby, swallowed a gallon of saltwater laughing.

  Kerr and Mitchum collaborated on the most amusing moments of the whole shoot during a visit by an inspector from the Catholic Legion of Decency, the self-appointed censorship board. Invited by Fox to verify that the film’s depiction of Miss Kerr’s nun character was entirely respectable, the Legion sent a suitably severe man of the cloth down to Tobago to observe the filming. He soon began making complaints and demanding changes, perceiving something smutty in the most innocent line and gesture. One day he arrived on the set as Huston was preparing a scene between Mitchum and Kerr. Huston greeted the priest and then called for “Action.” Director and crew were deadpan as Bob and Deborah spoke their lines, then moved closer together, Mitchum sliding his hand under nun Kerr’s breasts while she cupped his buttocks and they began to kiss with open-mouthed abandon. The Legion of Decency man’s eyes widened, he grasped at his heart and screamed, “What is going on there?!”

  “No talking, Father,” said Huston. “Dammit, now you’ve gone and ruined a perfectly good take.”

  The only other speaking parts in the film belonged to the Japanese soldiers, heard conversing among themselves in one scene. Waiting till the last minute to find Japanese-speaking bit players, the casting scout wound up on a frantic island-hopping search, finally securing the services of eight émigrés living in a Japanese farm colony in Brazil. To play the nonspeaking Japanese forces, the film drafted fifty Chinese from the restaurants and and hand laundries of Trinidad. The film’s American invaders were a hundred actual marines.

  For the filming of the bombing raid, everyone had come down to the beach to watch the fireworks. There were supposed to be a couple of dozen explosions scattered across the sand over the span of a couple of minutes. But the powder man’s setup short-circuited and the explosions went off prematurely and all at once, nearly blowing the beach off the island. There were remarkably few injuries considering the destruction, but one special-effects man was temporarily blinded.

  You might be called on to take your lumps for Huston even when the cameras weren’t turning. The director had hired a local driver and baby-sitter for his visiting kids, a young islander named Irwin. He was a handsome, muscular giant and an amateur boxer, and the more Huston saw of him, the more he began to envision him as the next heavyweight champion, with Huston himself the lad’s manager and chief beneficiary. He goaded a reluctant Mitchum into going
a few rounds with the new champ, and a little boxing ring was rigged up. Mitchum stepped in and looked up and up at his towering opponent. The bell sounded and, said Mitchum, “I just stuck my left hand out and he fell down.”

  A more noteworthy battle took place at the veranda bar of the Blue Haven Hotel where Bob and Dorothy were having some refreshments one evening. Three American marines from the ersatz invading force arrived with, it seemed, the express purpose of getting into a brawl with the mighty Mitchum. Whether they had originally intended for the whole trio to attack one actor at the same time or whether this became an emergency tactic once Mitchum’s interest was engaged is not known. A first soldier reportedly tapped Mitchum on the shoulder and told him he could knock him off his feet with one punch, and what did he think of that? Mitchum told him to take a shot, which the boy did. Then, deciding to avail himself of another try without first asking permission, the marine found himself on the floor, seeing stars of a different variety. The other patrons at the bar watched in wonderment as the American movie actor began punching the daylights out of his countrymen, one tumbling down the staircase, another slugged in the head and dropping to the floor, out cold, and a third man dragged over to the railing of the veranda from which Mitchum had planned to toss him twenty feet to the wading pool below when he felt blows rain down on his head and neck from a high-heeled shoe.

  “Hey . . . you’re supposed to be on my side!” he said.

  “You were starting to enjoy it,” Dorothy told him.

  The film was a beauty. It was a movie that was stripped to the bare essentials, but not a thing was lacking. It was funny, tender, exciting, visually enchanting, the empty blue sky and sea a soothing treat for the eye; Kerr was superb, and Mitchum, playing dumb as the good-hearted marine whose only knowledge of life is “the Corps,” gave a deceptively simple performance that was in fact a fully created characterization of inestimable grace and charm.

  Huston and Mitchum: They had grown to be close friends during the filming, or as close as two larger-than-life rogues who both preferred the role of top dog in the pound could ever hope to be. There were long bull sessions together, in the evenings and late at night or in the long days when this or that crucial member of the company was laid up in bed moaning with fever. They drank, played poker, and, of course, traded stories, usually with a retinue of idolators lounging around them for an audience. They talked about making movies and adventures in foreign lands. Mitchum was delighted to learn a salient fact about one of his small handful of favorite films, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, shot in Mexico—John told him they were all smoking grass down there, high as clouds for most of the picture. Huston spoke of films he planned to do someday. There was a sense, not quite spoken but both of them felt it, that they could go on together, a creative partnership making great movies one after the other, the way Huston had done with Bogart in years past. They spoke of Huston’s dream project, a grand-scale film of Kipling’s adventure story, “The Man Who Would Be King.” He had once thought of it for Bogart and Gable, but Bogie was old now and sick.

  “We could have some real fun making that one, Bob. We’d shoot it all in Bhutan, in the Himalayas.”

  “How do you figure we could do that, John? They don’t permit foreigners, and there’s no road in or out.”

  Huston’s eyes went wide, like a little boy’s on Christmas morning.

  “Parachute, kid . . . parachute.”

  chapter eleven

  Gorilla Pictures

  “THE THREE TOUGHEST GUYS in the movie business,” said Budd Boetticher, the great American film director, bullfighter, horseman, “were Jack Palance, Bob Ryan, and Mitchum. And Mitchum was the toughest. And very soft and tender, like a lot of really tough guys. We met when I first got started directing and he was just starting out, and we were dear friends. We never got to see enough of each other, but the times we were together we had a lot of fun. Once when I was working at Universal he came and took me over to meet what he said was ‘the dumbest girl in the world.’ And it was Marilyn Monroe. And we went over when she was making a picture called Don’t Bother to Knock and he said, ‘This girl is really off the wall.’ And of course she wasn’t really. She could be very smart about some things. But Bob said what he thought, and he was funny as hell. We would always talk about doing a picture together. I wrote Two Mules for Sister Sara for Bob. It was going to be Bob and Silvia Pinal, and it would have been a helluva picture. They took it and messed it up, and with my friend Clint in it. But me and Bob were always hoping to work together, right up to the end.

  “Back in the ’fifties, I got an invitation for the inauguration of the new governor in [a state in northern] Mexico. I was to go down to lead the parade before the afternoon bullfight on Sunday with Carlos Aruzza, taking down one of my fancy Spanish horses. Then there would be the inauguration and a big dinner party. I was told I could bring a guest and so I took Bob and Dorothy, who I loved dearly. The bullfight went off well, the opening parade was great, and we went to the dinner party. Now along the way Bob was interested to hear about the outgoing governor because he had the reputation for being the worst politician in the history of Mexico—and boy, if you know Mexico, that’s really being crooked. He was smuggling hookers and dope and gold and everything else. But he had had his six years and he was out. Well, after the bullfight we’re all at the big dinner, and Bob and Dorothy are seated right next to the ex-governor. And everybody was drinking and having a good time. But I guess Bob never knew who he was sitting next to because all of a sudden I hear Bob’s voice and he’s saying to ex-Governor ‘Well, it sounds like they got you into office just in time. I understand that that son of a bitch who was here the last six years was the biggest damn crook in the country, he had a whore racket, and he’s running a dope ring.’ And the ex-governor is looking at him as he’s saying this and he’s not happy with it; it’s in front of everybody, all these distinguished guests. And I tried to get Bob’s eye and I couldn’t and finally I just muttered to him, ‘Bob, that’s the former governor you’re talking to.’ And Bob just blinked, didn’t miss a beat, and he said, And you know, Governor . . . , my pappy always told me, when you grow up, son, whatever you do you try to be the biggest and best in the whole damn world, whatever it is. And I always thought that / was the biggest and best no good son of a bitch in the whole damn world, but . . . here I am talking to him. And it’s a real honor. ‘And the man didn’t know how to take it, but he decided it was all in fun and he started laughing; and he says, ‘This guy’s got balls!’ Which of course he did.”

  “Bob was by nature a very lonely person,” said his sister Julie. “He had a sensitivity that was difficult for him to reveal to outsiders. He never let many people see that side of him.” Mitchum kept no childhoood pals, no bosom buddies. “I don’t think he ever really wanted or needed anyone like that,” said Reva Frederick, “someone you talked to every week or month, someone you shared your problems with. There were people he was delighted to run into, to take a call from and catch up on the news with, like Victor Buono and Sinatra and people like that, they got along great, but then he went on his way. Perhaps it would have been a problem for him, opening himself up, letting someone understand you, know your problems, your feelings, the way you would do with a real friend. Robert, I think, had a great deal of sensitivity and a lot of fears that he would not want to share with anyone. But I have no idea. I really have no idea if that’s what it was. Tim Wallace was the closest person that Robert ever had as a real friend. But Tim was older than Robert, and Robert was so superior to Tim in so many ways, intelligence, talent, money, he was over Tim, it was in no way a friendship of equals. Tim was just there, company. If Robert wanted to drive up to Montana he could always grab Tim and Tim would say, ‘Sure!’ He was always delighted to go anywhere, do anything. He would tell jokes, do whatever you needed, including get out in the middle of a freeway and change a tire. He was an ideal companion who never asked anything of you and always did what you wanted. That
was Robert’s one friend. The rest were guys he could talk to at lunch or have a few drinks with. That was all he wanted. He didn’t need anyone getting closer to him than that.”

  A loner, but a gregarious one, Mitchum had people he called pals, male and female, all over the world and in all variety of high and low places. “He was extremely adaptable,” said Reva. “You could toss him down anywhere and he could find someone to talk to. And I mean anyone. He could have a conversation with people from every conceivable walk of life.” Through the years he had passing acquaintanceship or intermittent friendships with generals, makeup men, politicians, ex-convicts, surgeons, stunt guys, Nobel Prize—winning scientists, salesmen, cowboys, barflies, stewardesses, government leaders, strippers, even a few policemen (he told people that the cops always had the best dope). He liked the company and conversation of writers and had proudly bent an elbow with John Steinbeck and with A. B. “Bud” Guthrie, author of The Big Sky. For many years he kept in touch with novelist James Atlee Phillips, the man who wrote Thunder Road, and he had a long-standing acquaintance with Barnaby Conrad, the author of Matador and the owner of a hip watering hole by the same name. Conrad first met Mitchum at his San Francisco nightspot, the actor taking up the Matador’s weighty guest book and scribbling, “Compadre . . . When all the broken crockery of desperate communion is swept from under our understanding heels we may find on that clear expanse of floor the true and irrevocable target of infinite thrust.” Forty years later Conrad was still trying to figure out what it meant.